“Winter is coming!” cries a young boy as the moon slowly eclipses the sun. A warm summer morning in central Oregon turns to downright chilly as dusk sweeps across the land. I watch as a line of fire ants scurry onward seemingly unperturbed. At 10:18 AM totality is marked by a small group of humans shouting: “Stars! I see Venus! I see Sirius!” Coyotes in the canyon below join in with howls. For a full minute, the plasma of the sun radiates in an uneven diamond shape around the black disc of the moon. I choke up with tears, in utter awe of the beauty and power of our solar system’s star. A burst of light serves as both a promise of the sun’s return and a public service announcement to all humans to don their eclipse glasses post-totality. I feel jittery yet still, like I had drunk far too much caffeine beneath a lake, and am utterly grateful to live as a tiny ant human on this planet.
“A million moons” whispers an 8 year old boy crouched over the crescent shadows on fine desert dust. Barring mathematics, intuition and years of tracking the sun, moon and earth’s arcs to predict such an event, I am delighted to learn that to predict an eclipse one could read the crescent-shaped shadows on the ground at 90% totality. If I see crescent shaped shadows, I’ll know to get ready to shield a baby’s eyes and get comfortable should I ever find myself in an apoceclipse.
– Albert Einstein, February 12, 1950